Progress! Automotive Research Group Pumps the Brakes on Animal Experiments After Talks With PETA

Huge progress! A major motor vehicle industry–backed research organization is hitting the brakes on cruel experiments on animals, following more than two years of talks with PETA scientists.

The Health Effects Institute, which studies the effects of air pollution and is largely funded by the global automotive industry and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, confirmed to PETA that it has no plans to fund experiments on animals for the foreseeable future.

This shift in gears is a welcome change from decades of air pollution experiments on thousands of animals around the world—including dogs, monkeys, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, rats and mice—the institute bankrolled since its inception in 1980.

The decision comes after PETA first contacted the institute in 2023, urging it to switch to state-of-the-art, animal-free, and human-relevant research methods.

The institute previously funded experimenters who:

• Repeatedly forced mice to inhale a carcinogen, punctured their hearts, killed, and dissected them.
• Repeatedly force-fed mice a toxic chemical, took their blood, killed, and dissected them.
• Exposed mice to a high concentration of ozone, which causes airway inflammation, injected them with a drug that blocks spontaneous breathing, intubated them and pumped their lungs with air, and killed and dissected them.
• Cut off mice’s nerves, intubated them, pumped them with a substance that manipulates lung functions, killed, and dissected them.
• Repeatedly injected guinea pigs with a substance that worsens inflammation, exposed them to a high concentration of ozone to induce airway inflammation, cut them open and inserted tubes and wires into their chests, took their blood, killed, and dissected them.

What You Can Do

Please help us achieve more wins for animals used in experimentation by urging Wegmans Food Markets to stop supporting an institute that has paid to experiment on animals.